Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Cynicism and Gullibility, Faith and Intellection, Pigs and Mothers

Cognitively speaking, the secular left generally operates in a mode of lazy cynicism, which makes it difficult for them to understand anything beneath the surface or from above and beyond the call of deity. Indeed, you will have noticed that they habitually ridicule and sneer at these things, and then call it "sophistication."

Which it is, in the original sense of the word, i.e., sophistry, or a kind of artificial or counterfeit wisdom that negates it precisely. At best, it is a kind of cunning that is always in service to the vital mind below, not the mind of light above. It is calculation based upon the ego's interests, not a surrender to the Truth, which always weakens the ego. Schuon said words to the effect that to assimilate a truth is to die a little. Therefore, to know Truth as such would represent total death and rebirth. You know, " I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."

But at the same time, we see that leftists are also the most naive and gullible people on the planet, and the two are related. That is, because they cannot reliably penetrate the surface, liberals believe the craziest things, e.g., global warming, global cooling, poverty causes crime, men and women are identical, UAD (unintelligent absence of design), this is the worst economy since the great depression, Iran is not a threat, Saddam was not a threat, the USSR and the US were morally equivalent, Bush is a torturer, Bush lied us into war. The list goes on and on. They are especially naive about the nature of hatred and evil, since they have no insight into their own.

Importantly, just as assimilating truth weakens the ego and nourishes the mind of light, liberal gullibility strengthens the ego and extinguishes the mind of light. Never wonder why the stupidity of the left is so "invincible," for it is as strong as Death.

Just as cynicism and gullibility are joined at the hip, so too are faith and intellection. The liberal -- because he is an idiot -- confuses faith with gullibility, when it is the opposite. That is, faith is belief in order to know, not -- as is cynicism -- a preemptive attack on higher reality in order to not know it.

Faith is openness and receptivity (o) to the Real; it is an unknowing of the lower in order clear a space for the higher -- like turning the lights down in the theatre so you can enjoy the movie. But the sophisticates of the left want to turn the lights on as brightly as possible, and then ridicule those who believe in this nonexistent thing called a "movie." Think of a church as a theatre and the service as the movie. The screen can only be seen in darkness and silence. I am now typing in total darkness.

To give a specific example, the left is a big believer in what they call "sex education." The problem is, they are forbidden by their own lazy cynicism (and therefore gullibility) to ever teach about human sexuality, only animal sexuality projected onto the human plane. If you do mention human sexuality, then you will be accused of "violating the wall between church and state," when what you are actually doing is respecting the gulf between animal and human.

Obviously, human sexuality has reproductive as well as non-reproductive (i.e., non-Darwinian) purposes. At best, the secular leftist might say that the additional purpose is pleasure, but that would be a very stupid thing to say. So the left can only teach humans about animal sexuality, and then wonder why the humans behave like animals. What are they supposed to do? Get married? That implies that human sexuality has a nonlocal telos, and any Darwinian sophisticate knows that that is nonsense, just an elaborate self-deception.

Yes, this is just a rambling prelude to what I really wanted to discuss -- which is the further evolution into the overmental -- but here is a fine example of what we're talking about today at NRO, The Angst of the Aging Lecher:

"In his essay, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, Wendell Berry writes that the 'voyeur cannot crack the shell'; to behold copulating bodies is not to capture sexual intimacy, the mysterious union of souls. In the new film, Elegy, George O’Hearn, a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet tells his academic friend, David Kepesh that, having given their lives to serial sexual relationships, they cannot break the 'beauty barrier.' They are voyeurs who cannot 'crack the shell.'"

Ah, what an unexpected cooncidence. The article continues: "In Kepesh, Elegy gives us a certain highly successful academic type, common enough on American campuses, an academic who combines great intellectual discipline with rather loose sexual mores. What starts out as exuberant passion over time comes to infect the intellectual life itself. The result is an academic life permeated by vanity, wherein truth-seeking is subordinate to the task of drawing attention to oneself, to what and whom one knows. In the case of academics like Kepesh, intellectual prowess becomes an instrument of the sexual seduction of attractive students" (emphasis mine).

You see? Exactly what I was saying above about how the cynical mind is a vital mind that cannot penetrate surfaces and know spiritual reality. Fascinating -- you can also see how the spiritual drive, since it is denied expression due to cynicism, is displaced to the vital, leading to the compulsive -- which it must be, since it cannot know the depth that sustains a relationship -- pursuit of sexual conquest:

"For Kepesh, who walked out on his family many years ago after concluding that marriage is a trap, Consuela is but the latest stage in his restless pursuit of his peculiar version of the American dream -- the next frontier, the latest conquest. As he states, 'Every time you make love you get revenge for all the things that have defeated you in life.' Lending erudition to the free-love moment of the 1960s, Kepesh contends that serial sexuality is more honest, and certainly more pleasurable, than marriage. As he puts it in one wrenching conversation with his bitter and alienated son, Kenneth, abandoning the family was the honest thing to do."

You see? Like a pathetic wretch such as Bill Maher, he actually flatters himself that he is the unflinchingly courageous and honest man who faces life squarely and lives his life free of spiritual illusions. How's that working for you, Doc?

"Kepesh’s attempt to live honestly according to the flesh is, however, hardly an uncomplicated matter of freely satisfied desire. Again, Berry is perceptive: 'Sexual liberation ought logically to have brought in a time of ‘naturalness,’ ease, and candor between men and women. It has, on the contrary, filled the country with sexual self-consciousness, uncertainty, and fear.' Lust, as C.S. Lewis once said, is more abstract than logic. So long as sex involves another human, entanglements will emerge. To protect himself and to continue to cultivate his lifestyle, Kepesh ends up lying to the two women in his life."

So first, Kepesh must "flatten" the emotional surface of life, which then leads to its cognitive and spiritual flattening, which in turn leads to the vital Lie in order to keep the whole charade going. And this will become a deeply entrenched lie, on pain of evoking a sucidal depression over having literally wasted one's life and missed the whole point.

Never ask why leftists hold on to their lies so fiercely. It's obvious. Pride cometh before a fall, but if it is inflated to truly grandiose proportions, it can put off that eventuality until death. In other words, ontological pride can be a sort of vessel that gets one through the journey from biological birth to death. Buy you will not have actually traveled anywhere. In a way, you will never have been born. Or perhaps we can say that you will "only" be born. You will exclude yourself from the second birth, or initiation into the realm of the human. Spiritual asphyxiation is not pretty:

"As he ages, his carefree devotion to the 'carnal aspects of the human comedy' looks more like a cover for anxious dread in the face of death. At the outset, he quotes Tolstoy: a man’s greatest surprise is age. Fear of death, loss, and loneliness plague Kepesh. Avoiding the snare of marriage, he finds himself trapped in an old age without affection and love."

I'm going to say something here that is bound to be misunderstood, but I'm sure that one of you will appreciate the point. I even ran it by Mrs. G last night, and once I explained what I meant, she put down the frying pan.

What I said was something to the effect that, in order for a man to properly love a woman, he must first know how to properly hate them. I have to admit that the sentence popped out of my mouth before I had time to understand my point -- which I often do, so that I can "think beyond myself," so to speak.

I was thinking about how Obama, precisely because he is such a feminized man, expresses such undisguised contempt for women, such as the recent pig comment. Now, why would Obama have unconscious issues with women? One reason might be that he didn't have a noble father in his life, for him to emulate and teach him how to be a man. Instead, his primary identification is with the devouring or idealizing mother, which naturally creates resentment, since fixation in the realm of mother-love prevents one from becoming a Man. (You will also have noticed how frightened he seems to be of his wife, and how sensitive and easily wounded he appears to be.)

Children think in very broad strokes and stark categories. Therefore, a boy's turn to father is always accompanied by a kind of devaluation of mother and the female realm in general (I'm certainly seeing it in my son, as he struggles to pry himself free of mother and turn toward father; just as he used to get angry at me for coming between him and his mother, now he gets angry at her for coming between us). For you mothers of boys, I'm sure you noticed the pattern as your boys grew up. The wise and secure mother does not interfere with this devaluation, because it is part of the process of detaching from biology itself, in order to become the spiritual and social archetype of Man.

Then, once a boy is a man, he can return to the realm of the feminine with a whole new appreciation and wonder -- and equally importantly -- no residual, unconscious resentment. But as Harvey Mansfield notes, you cannot be a gentleman unless you first become a man. The left is full of metrosexual gentlemen who hide their hate behind layers of sophistication and sophistry.

Is it any coincidence that the most gynocentric subculture also features the most blatant misogyny, i.e, rap? Is it any coincidence that Hugh Hefner is one of the biggest supporters of feminism, or that all the lady killers of Hollywood are vocal feminists? Is it any coincidence that the left hates Sarah Palin? No, of course not. To be a feminist, you really have to despise femininity.

Back to the film: it "shows the consequences of a dreadful reduction of imagination, even literary imagination, to fantasy. On this point, Berry is eloquent, 'In sex, as in other things, we have liberated fantasy but killed imagination, and so have sealed ourselves in selfishness and loneliness. Fantasy is of the solitary self, and it cannot lead us away from ourselves. It is by imagination that we cross over the differences between ourselves and other beings and thus learn compassion, forbearance, mercy, forgiveness, sympathy, and love.' Having cultivated the fantasies of the solitary self, Kepesh, increasingly aware that his lust will soon turn to ashes, desperately seeks some other sort of human contact."

Cynicism, gullibility, fantasy, unreality, hatred, death.

Faith, Intellection, Imagination, Reality, Love, Life.

*****

Lileks touches on some of these themes today: "if there’s one thing that’s amused me in the last two weeks, it’s the screechy distaste of Ms. Palin coming from men who embodied the Modern Alda Paradigm of masculinity, which is to say they are nervous around cars, think guns are icky, had their own Snugli, have wives in corporate jobs who make more money than they do, and still get dissed behind their backs because they can’t figure out how to make the bed. The Lost Boys, if you will."

67 comments:

Obviously, human sexuality has reproductive as well as non-reproductive (i.e., non-Darwinian) purposes.

Why would non-reproductive uses for sex be necessarily non-Darwinian? Consider the discussion of Bonobo ("pygmy") chimpanzees here, where it's recognized that sex also appears to serve the purpose of maintaining social bonds.

Humans have a much more complex society, of course, and sex has a much more complicated role to play. But "sex is just for brute reproduction" or even "sex is just for bare pleasure" is no requirement of evolutionary biology.

...expresses such undisguised contempt for women, such as the recent pig comment.

A psychiatrist has a special temptation to fall into what C.S. Lewis called Bulverism: "You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. As he continues, "no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time" until "you find my arithmetic wrong".

Even if the "lipstick on a pig" comment meant what Bob says it does here (does Obama have a similar deep psychological resentment against fish, too?) can we be sure the deduced "contempt" carries over to all women and is not restricted to Palin?

Bob is not suggesting that Obama is misogynist because of the pig comment. Rather, Obama lets such comments slip because of his misogyny, a misogyny that generally afflicts the emasculated and feminized men of the left.

I think it is important, this notion that one must know how to hate properly if one is to know how to love.

I'm often struck by how people handle 'Love thy neighbor' and/or 'Love thy enemy'. They 'make evil good' so that it is easy to love that person.

But, I'll be honest. I know some people who are in their own way really vile. And it's true, I've got a share of it myself. But I have to love them nonetheless. But 'hating properly' means in this sense, to know where to place a boundary, to know what to revile, to know what is wrong and evil. If your best friend manipulates you foolishly, irrationally and selfishly, to forgive him is not as simple as lying - saying it was no big deal. It is a matter of reviling the contemptible and evil act but loving the person who 'knew not what he did.'

For if he really knew what he did, he would not have done it. (Understanding that phrase, of course, more mystically and broadly than the usual.)

Also, since marriage requires rejecting all women but one, there is very truth in your statement. It is like where in Genesis it is noted, "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated."

"Even if the "lipstick on a pig" comment meant what Bob says it does here (does Obama have a similar deep psychological resentment against fish, too?) can we be sure the deduced "contempt" carries over to all women and is not restricted to Palin?"

For a person to consciously or unconsciously automatically equate any one woman with pigs or fish (barring a really obvious comparison, and I've only ever known one woman who actually called either and both appellations to mind), there must first exist a general equation in his mind of women with pigs and fish.

Look at it this way: if McCain were making a speech about Obama's bad policy ideas, and said something about how Obama wants to tax the rich to provide "universal fried chicken and watermelon" for the working poor, but (the point being) that it's bad policy, would anyone believe that he was just coming up with a harmless and meaningless example? Or would they rightly conclude that there was some deep-seated and rather malicious racism (not just against Obama but against blacks in general) lurking either in McCain's conscious or subconscious mind? And wouldn't he be absolutely (and rightly) vilified for making such an odious statement, on both sides of the aisle?

Unless you've been living in a vacuum, you've heard women compared to pigs, as a teenager if at no other point. And, as Vanderleun makes clear, there's no secret about the fish reference, either.

To pretend you don't know what he meant strikes me as transparently disingenuous at best.

What does 'hate' mean? Is it possible that, like other words, that 'hate' might mean different things entirely in different contexts, and not in an 'I'm trying to evade the implications of my statement' kind of way?

"If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.” (Lk 14:26)…”Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. (I Jn 4:7)”

Slightly off-topic, but Bwahaha!. And in answer to the author's question, no. I dream about water and journeys, and last night about finding a home under the canopy of an inverted tree in the midst of a forest. Last weekend, I dove into a safe swimming spot in the ocean and touched the sandy bottom, but when my foot crossed the boundary from the light to the dark, a leviathan grabbed me, and I had to fight it off before coming up for air. Fortunately, I had a dive knife.

But about elections and candidates? Hah - nope, my subconscious has more important stories to project.

Julie - I've heard police referred to as pigs, but I can honestly say I've never heard women as a class referred to or compared with pigs. (Men being called pigs, though - heck yes. Quick Google check: "men are pigs" ~90,000, "women are pigs" ~5,000.) I have heard the "lipstick on a pig" phrase before, of course, but every time I can recall, someone was talking about papering over a software design problem with bug-prone glue code. In other words, inadequately covering up, rather than solving, a deep-seated flaw.

I've heard the fish jokes Van talks about, but if those comments were meant to apply as insults directly to the opposing canditates (as opposed to their policies), and if the pig reference applies personally to Palin, the "old fish" one would have to apply to McCain.

In any case, I'm not even trying to dispute the idea that the comments were intended as insulting. I'm just asking why they must automatically imply deep-seated generalized misogyny. Why doesn't Hanlon's Razor apply here?

Nomo - Sorry, all I can see is "not loving as much" being equated with "hate". Apparently more of my spiritual blindness. Oh, well.

The Luke quote is generally explained as hyperbole, as having such great love for Christ that it dwarfs familial love. Otherwise the command to love one's neighbor would be hard to reconcile.

Of course, if that's the case, then things like rejecting others that aren't one's spouse is completely different 'hate' than what Obama's supposed to have, and I have a hard time following the connection.

Ray, Regarding Luke 14:26 to me it is talking about seeing and hating the falseness in ourselves and yes our family members. Jesus was offering his disciples a route beyond this falsness but you had to first see it and secondly be willing to take the bridge to get out of it. The bridge of course was not without its own trials.

This kind of hate, perhaps known as dispassion in buddhism is an intelligent hate a form of discrimination that is utterly necessary for us to get out of our own snares and land minds. It leads us to ultimate truth and unity and ultimate love. Where there is love there is no comparison, so it is not that this love dwarfs famial love, if you are like me it is that you currently experience much of your family relationships with alot of mind parasites and baggage and a part of you is even attached to this dysfunction and labels it as love when it is not.

Apropos comes this observation buried in a whole cluster by Jay Nordlinger at NRO:

"Anyway, a few days ago, someone wrote and said — this is not necessarily hate mail, but I want to make another point — “So, when are you going to denounce your best buddy Lynn Westmoreland? Huh, huh?”

And I’m thinking, “Who’s she? The daughter or niece of the late general?” So, I Googled — and she turns out to be a man: a congressman from Georgia — who ignorantly described the Obamas as “uppity.” I say “ignorantly,” because the man later swore he never knew it had any racial connotations. Seems hard to believe, but . . .

Every day, I discover that people don’t know things you think they should."

You mentioned Chapter 2 of Perry's book, which I also finished recently. One of the nice things about OC, I'm sure you'd agree, is that Bob peppers his posts with examples from current events, which gives a sense of immediacy and familiarity to the ideas he's discussing.

Since this isn't the case with Perry, and since we're not familiar with his thinking, that book seems much "denser" than the posts here, even though the thrust of the ideas are very similar.

But, lo! As you said, along comes Ray, and provides us the perfect - one could say "classic" - illustration of what Perry describes! What else can we feel but gratitude?

That book is dense, isn't it? I find myself highlighting almost every sentence, because nearly every sentence is rich with so many implications. Fine example of unsaturated writing, which evokes an interactive response on the reader. Very much the opposite of academic writing, which buries one or two ideas in a flabby and unnecessary book.

Great post, Bob! It's clear to me that the more Sarah Palin mocks Obama, the more his rage becomes apparent.

And when Palin mocks Obama, it's all true.

Obama's response is like a toddler throwing a tantrum. There's no truth to his words at all.In fact, he tries to deflect all attacks on his policies onto something else, like the Constitution. Projecting truth's he doesn't even believe in.Obama is committing cluelesside.

You know who else has a meltdown when they are mocked?The Islamofascists.

I hope Palin, and McCain too, continue to mock Obama.Watching Obama and the Left melt down is entertaining, to say the least.

Thank you, thank you, Bob! I could not remember where I had read the fantasy/imagination quote and I wanted to revisit that.

"For you mothers of boys, I'm sure you noticed the pattern as your boys grew up. The wise and secure mother does not interfere with this devaluation, because it is part of the process of detaching from biology itself, in order to become the spiritual and social archetype of Man."

This seems to happen with my boys around age 3. I'd read about this developmental stage and was prepared for it, but really more prepared by the birth of the latest baby than anything else. ;) Oh wonderful, daddy saves the day! ;) In fact, I believe James Dobson wrote a book about this.

"To be a feminist, you really have to despise femininity."

Amen, Bob! I don't want the label "feminist" anywhere near me, having always found it antithetical to the teachings and example of Christ. Ramesh Ponnuru wrote about this at the Corner:

"Another question: Over the years I have run into "conservative feminists," "pro-life feminists," "libertarian feminists," "Christian feminists," and many, many other varieties. In addition to not quite understanding what the "feminism" consists of, I don't see the value of trying to stake a claim to the word. Most American women don't consider themselves feminists, after all. This isn't valuable real estate to occupy."

Also, in case you're wondering, I do sometimes go (for instance, I'm about to go to WalMart), I occasionally like sport (football and hockey are fun to watch), I've been around (most of the country as well as overseas), and am very into candid photography.

First of all, Obama's pig/lipstick comment was never associated with Palin. That taken out of context statement is common metaphor that has become a republican bullying tactic. Bob, your book was profound! But I'd ask you reflect on your judgements. The infantile projections may not just be coming from left leaning politicians.

Well, to answer Ray, it seems to me that everything has to do with reproduction in the Darwinian scheme, because of the primacy of natural selection.

So, whereas some things are more directly related to reproduction than others (like the act of copulation), all things essentially boil down to successful reproduction in the end (like food, money, power, leisure, politics).

This is because to get anything done, even spiritually, one must first exist in a physcal body. It is the admission ticket to the show, so to speak.

This is why to dismiss Darwinism altogether is folly; to allow it a prominent place at the table among other considerations is wisdom.

Julie said-"I dream about water and journeys, and last night about finding a home under the canopy of an inverted tree in the midst of a forest. Last weekend, I dove into a safe swimming spot in the ocean and touched the sandy bottom, but when my foot crossed the boundary from the light to the dark, a leviathan grabbed me, and I had to fight it off before coming up for air. Fortunately, I had a dive knife.

But about elections and candidates? Hah - nope, my subconscious has more important stories to project."

Well said, Julie! I have dreams like that too! No Leviathans yet, but pretty much stuff like your dreams. Never have I dreamed about politics.

So what's the story behind Aurobindo (the album)? The one review is interesting:

"One of the strangest and most original, indescribable works of sound ever created. What is it? I don't know and I still don't know but I love it. Ambient drone, fragments of electro-magnetic crystal-volt time, Marcel Duchamp, an old 78 is stretched out into the molecular future. It's insane."

He gave it five stars. Going by the samples, it sounds like the background to a spooky movie or video game. But otherwise, there's no info about it whatsoever that I can find.

"Why would non-reproductive additional purposes for sex automatically be non-Darwinian?"

Sex is covenantal. You know when God says, "I will write my law on their hearts"? The equivalent in the human realm is husband and wife writing their covenant on each other's hearts, so to speak, and literally becoming one flesh, one entity out of two separate entities. That's why marriage is so often used in scripture as a word-picture of our relationship with Christ. Covenant is preeminent even over reproduction.

And thus you can see why deviancy is such a demonic twisting of God's excellent design.

I don't know. Alert readers will have noticed that I try to pick a musical selection that ties in with the theme of the post. So I looked up an album called "Involution" by the great tenorman Sam Rivers, but it's out of print. Instead, that album came up.

It sounds like a typical ambient album in the mode of Steve Roach or Robert Rich, a genre I used to very much enjoy for deep meditative revelry. This is the first time I've ever linked to an album I haven't yet heard, but the tracks all sound pretty interesting, so I'll be downloading it if I can't find a cheap used copy.

From the looks of the titles, it would appear that it was put together by a couple of disciples to commemorate different events in the Adventure of Consciousness.

Good heavens we've got oceans of deep stuff going on, today. One of my recurring dreams finds me at the beach on day of massive out of control waves. Odd that I, a former surfer, never find myself in the water.And I don't care how pygmy chimps have sex as long as I'm getting my needs met. And if, God forbid, the time should come- well I still won't care about the chimps. ;)Hate, huh?Lemme share some stuff. I wrote, a week or so ago, about a confrontation I had with a jerk at the local corner hangout.Well, that episode opened the floodgates on a whole world of anger that I was scarcely aware even existed. Somehow the jerk at the corner became a superconducting magnet for my personal junkyard, and shook loose a scrap metal ton of rage. Pretty much all I had. This one jerk became the focal point for all the negativity I had in me. That's hate.So I've been avoiding the corner. for a while. I recognize that the jerk is not the source of my rage. even though he opened the door on it. This whole thing has little or nothing to do with the jerk per se. What I have here, is collusion among a whole slew of mind parasites, none of whom have my best interests at heart. It's a demonic convergence worthy of a Berkeley demonstration. Rational voices abound- like the one that says, "Go beat the guy with a stick." Not good advice, you know?

I have prayed much on this, and I have been keeping in mind the old tried and true "WWSHMD" (What would stan have me do?) Stan's pretty clear."GO ye forth and kick-ass on the unrighteous one." And stan's got a bagful of goodies for me: adrenaline charges that would make a tweaker jealous, victory in battle- scratch that. Victory in righteous battle! (much better!) the admiration of others, including the twenty-some-year-old chicks who work at Starbucks.*And yes!* A reputation as a bad-ass dude (very important to the fifty-something crowd. It impresses the hell out of them at the emergency room as well.)

I'm not fallin' for it.I've been at war with this for several days now. The stan thing isn't a joke. I have a lot of good things going on in my life. The job. Wouldn't stan just love to see me lose it?What little money I have. Stan would like for me to spend it on lawyers. And so forth.As I said, I've been praying on this, and I do have a friend at work who has been through this kind of thing, and is giving me some time as well as some good advice. Slowly, I'm turning it around. But it is not easy, and it is not fun. This episode has drained more joy from my life than hangover, a toothache, and a whole string of bad colds.You know- I'm beginning to suspect that is one of those obstacles to spiritual growth that we've been reading about. (and just when I was all set for some slack time)

JWM, I'm glad to see that you're keeping the battle where it belongs. And you're right, stan and the minions are no joke.

"I recognize that the jerk is not the source of my rage. even though he opened the door on it. This whole thing has little or nothing to do with the jerk per se."

I've found in life that if you can pinpoint what the true problem is, you can focus all of that energy into dealing with it in such a way that it can be resolved or at least eased somewhat. And that's where the real good fight lies.

Although it does sound as though, in the previous encounter at least, you probably did a bit of a public service. While it's not good to overreact, it's rarely a bad thing to tell a jerk when they're crossing the line.

"Never wonder why the stupidity of the left is so 'invincible,' for it is as strong as Death."

That Wendy Doniger writes a column for Newsweek surprises little. That this blatantly shallow and -- yes, stupid == woman is "Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School" is frankly a little frightening.

Just what are the long-term implications of this "long march through the institutions" which is now largely a fait acompli in the UK, and should the election of Alinsky acolyte BHO transpire, will be well advanced here as well.

Stupid the Leftists may be. But crafty, determined, cunning and stealthy they are also.

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them - particularly verbs: they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs - however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!'

'Would you tell me, please,' said Alice, 'what that means?'

'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased.

The post seems to simplify the stances of the left into a specific category, a stereotype I suppose of what the left seems like. I feel that reducing the world into black/white really muddles your creative advantages.

Take the current view of this administration, that a state is either an ally, an enemy, or effectively neutral. So say perhaps we have ties with Georgia, and since we're the good guys, obviously Georgia is a good guy too. So when Georgia launches an offensive on its own land(occupied by Russian citizens), and Russia responds, suddenly Russia is the bad guy. Well, Russia most certainly did do something wrong in their over-reaction, but then again, has America not done the same?

--And what will happen is this will look like I'm equating America to Russia, however that most certainly is not the case, but America is by no means exempt from criticism for doing bad things for good causes.--

But getting to the point of creative advantages, we've lost cooperation from a major world power for painting the picture as an easy black and white conflict, that marks Russia as a wild and evil force. There are advantages to realizing that judgment should be as complex as the situations they judge, especially when your own intelligence comes back a month later and says, "Oops, we may have been a bit hasty in our condemnation."

How this relates to the post is the simplistic background Godwin paints for his enemy, which is almost essentially creating a straw man. Sure its easy to mock those liberals, but its just as easy to mock those red-neck, hick-town, gun-toting, belly-aching, uneducated, ignorant conservatives, but hardly do I see that kind of painting come from liberals. Usually it's on a per issue basis, because not every conservative is the same, just like not every liberal is the same.

What I'm essentially getting to is its easy to make liberals all seem the same and absurdly hypocritical by taking some big aspects and lumping them into one entity, but do that to a conservative and it looks ten times worse. Conservatives are as diverse as liberals, and by lumping them all in the same category really doesn't make any group look better.

"Cognitively speaking, the secular left generally operates in a mode of lazy cynicism, which makes it difficult for them to understand anything beneath the surface or from above and beyond the call of deity. Indeed, you will have noticed that they habitually ridicule and sneer at these things, and then call it "sophistication." "

Ray, just read that over and over. It won't help of course, but it is the answer to your questions. Talk to Hume about it... lots of answers there (as long as you don't pay attention to them).

"Sure its easy to mock those liberals, but its just as easy to mock those red-neck, hick-town, gun-toting, belly-aching, uneducated, ignorant conservatives, but hardly do I see that kind of painting come from liberals"

What About Bob?

Who's the dude that spirals down the celestial firepole on wings of slack, seizes the wheel of the cosmic bus, and abides in a bewilderness adventure of higher nondoodling? Who, haloed be his gnome, loiters on the threshold of the transdimensional doorway, looking for handouts from Petey? Who, with his doppelgägster and testy snideprick, Cousin Dupree, wields the pliers and blowtorch of fine insultainment for the ridicure of assouls? Who is the gentleman loaffeur who yoinks the sword from the stoned philosopher and shoves it in the breadbasket of metaphysical ignorance and tenure? Whose New Testavus for the Restavus blows the locked doors of the empyrean off their rusty old hinges and sheds a beam of intense darkness on the world enigma? Who is the Biggest Fakir of the Vertical Church of God Knows What, channeling the roaring torrent of 〇 into the feeble stream of cyberspace? Who is the masked pandit who lobs the first water balloon out the motel window at the annual Raccoon convention? Who is your nonlocal partner in disorganized crimethink? Shut your mouth! But I'm talkin' about bʘb! Then we can dig it!

Goround ZerO:

The Cosmic Area Rug:

The empty center is Beyond-Being. The circles are dimensions of Being. Your life is a path for the Spirit to pass from periphery to center. Thoughts and choices -- truth and virtue -- are the paving stones.

Only Error is Transmitted:

Buck Mulligan, Official Mascot

Official Sponsor of the Kosmic Kit Scouts, Laniakea Supercluster Chapter:

"No Kit Left Below"

Fuck You: War

Late last night, in search of light, I watched a ball of fire streak across the midnight sky. I watched it glow, then grow, then shrink, then sink into the silhouette of morning. As I watched it die, I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a lot in common with that light.’ That’s right. I’m alive with the fire of my life, which streaks across my span of time and is seen by those who lift their eyes in search of light to help them though the long, dark night. --Nilsson

We see that yesterday is our birthday, today is our life, and tomorrow we are gone. So we have just one day to learn all we need to know, and that day is today. --Petey